One L (1977)

by Scott Turow

  Many people had also been dogged to the end by the Estates in Land. Terry was able to answer only two of the four questions. Stephen also felt he had not done well and was also unhappy about his Con Law exam earlier.

  "You heard it here first," he told me. "Stephen Litowitz will not make the Law Review." He brightened in a few days, however, when he'd surveyed the other chief contenders--"the supercompetent people" was the way Stephen put it--and found that they too had had trouble with the test.

  Nicky's exam, two days later, was more or less as promised. Everybody had his outlines and crib sheets ready. While working on the test, I looked a few times at the Procedure outline we'd put together. After all of that, I suppose it proved somewhat useful.

  Facing the Memorial Day weekend there was only one test left, in Contracts on the first of June.

  6/1/76 (Tuesday)

  So it all comes down to Perini. It is only fitting that he provided our travail at the end.

  I just could not handle studying this past weekend. The way Perini had taught Contracts--one rule followed by a million exceptions--meant prolonged efforts at memorization, nearly unbearable after this three-week grind. I pored over the hornbook, but I could only sit half an hour, forty minutes at a time. Nor do I have enough respect for Perini left to care much about his evaluation.

  I saw Kyle skulking through' the hallways when I got there this morning before the test. He is normally so robust, but I guess he felt it was all on the line here, and he was cowering like a wounded animal, literally walking hunched beside the wall. I did my best to rattle him, came on chipper as a sunbeam. I tried to detain him in conversation while he was obviously chafing to go look at an outline one more time. Oh, I was the very soul of menace, and I still don't feel ashamed.

  Then I went into the test room. I come to these four-hour numbers with a virtual traveling commissary: earplugs, paper, four pencils, four pens, three rolls of mints, two packs of cigarettes, a cup of iced coffee, a Coke, two chocolate bars, a pencil sharpener, an extension cord for my typewriter. As I unloaded all of this equipment I took a lot of joshing from around the room. Thirty-five or forty of us would be typing. It was nice that for a minute we were all bound in, laughter again.

  At nine the proctor handed the exam out. It would be unlike Rudolph Perini not to give the hardest tests at Harvard Law School. The questions covered nine single-spaced pagesNicky's exam, by comparison, was three sides doubled. Before the test I was told that we would be taking the same exam as another section, with two differences: Our test would have five questions instead of four, and the other section would have eight hours.

  I went through the exam in the same desperate rush. I didn't pretend to do much thinking. At 11:15 I looked up the first time and realized it would all be over in two hours. I was giddy at the thought. The last question was a disordered series of phrases from various nursery rhymes. Perini asked us to describe the possible contract they might form, what the problems in its enforcement might be, and what common interpretative dilemmas were suggested. Perini, I thought, you are still not cool.

  When time was called at one, I walked back and forth at the front of the room applauding. I hooted, I hollered. I went out to the arcade where BSA was serving beer and drank four cups fast. Aubrey was also pie-eyed.

  "Well," he said, "all that stands between you and a J. D. is six thousand dollars." He meant the tuition.

  With Terry, Gina, and Mike Wald, I went out to lunch. When I got back, I emptied my locker into my backpack and called Annette, who'd volunteered to pick me up.

  On the way upstairs from the phone, I ran into Phyllis Wiseman. It hurt me to see her. After holding to that steadiness, that distance, all year, she had lost her grip. For her, the final holdout, the last month has been too much: the stuff with Kyle, the dismal atmosphere, and the crunch and exhaustion of the tests themselves.

  She was worried that she had not done well, that her family, her friends would not respect her. She was badly depressed.

  "I did a little better than so-so last term, and now," she said, "I just mixed it all up . . . It's always so sad around here."

  I told her, in so many words, she was okay--to tell herself she was okay.

  Annette arrived in a few minutes.

  "It's over!" I shouted when I got in the car.

  I've been repeating that to myself for the past few hours. It will probably take a couple of days for me to believe it. The first year of law school. It seemed sheer myth when my friends lived through it. Now I have, too. It is over. It is over.

  When Roscoe Pound, who eventually became the dean of Harvard Law School, entered as a first-year student in 1889, he was required to take courses in Torts, Criminal Law, Property, Contracts, and Common-Law Forms of Action, a nineteenth-century version of Civil Procedure. He mastered the law by reading cases; in class, his professors taught in the Socratic method. In a way, things were easier for Dean Pound than they were for me and my peers in the Harvard Law School class of 1978. He was able to pass the bar exam after only a single year of legal education. And he did not have to add an elective in the spring.

  But, of course, the resemblances between Dean Pound's first year and mine are striking. For nearly a century now, American lawyers have been bound together by the knowledge that they have all survived a similar initiation; it is something of agrand tradition. For me it was an experience of great extremes. What was bad was awful. But what was good often approached the ideal. I was regularly inspired and invigorated by what I was studying, and I seldom lost the feeling that I was making good use of myself. The riches of Harvard Law School--its students, its faculty, its eminence, and its traditions, which are always a presence--yielded for me a time of towering excitement and great fruitfulness. In many ways, it was the best year in the education of this person who must be counted as now entering something like the twentieth grade, and everything considered--everything--I would probably do it again.

  Yet it would be a decorous pulling of my punches not to say that I believe there are many ways in which the wealth of Harvard Law School is magnificently squandered. The century-old curriculum we inherited from Dean Pound is badly in need of change. Early in May, I attended an open meeting on legal education. It had been called by a group of first-year students, and despite the pressure of exams, 175 students arrived, most of them lLs. The size and mood of the crowd left little doubt of common dissatisfaction with many aspects of first-year education. The students were addressed by a panel of professors who had taught in the various 11, sections. Perini was among them, but so were a number of the youngest and most liberal members of the law-school faculty. Looking at them and at the students spilling through the aisles, Perini asked his older colleagues on the panel, "Are we the Christians here, gentlemen, or the lions?"

  Either way, I realized that the same array that faced Perini that evening will confront law teachers of his philosophy in the future. A new generation of law-school teachers--some of them students who were in that room, persons shaped by different experiences, and many, like Nicky Morris, outspokenly opposed to the old ways--will soon hold sway on law-school faculties. Even Perini freely acknowledged the handwriting on the wall.

  "There will be change," Perini admitted. "Not even I can claim that the Harvard Law School is the greatest and most divine institution in existence."

  Many of the directions for that change in the first-year curriculum are self-evident. At places more progressive than HLS there are already smaller classes, more opportunities for students to write and to make contact with the faculty, differing formats for evaluation of student performance, election to the Law Review without reference to grades. Harvard Law School itself is a far different place than it was in 1970, when my college friends entered. There was no such thing, then, as passing a professor's question in a first-year class; no teachers who, like Morris, tried to stress the broadest humanistic outlines of the law; no midyear exams. The case method, which once meant a reading diet of nothing but ca
se reports, has given way in recent years to the addition of journal articles, of writings which make the 'learning of the law less a piece-by-piece puzzling through and more like the real lawyer's task: a comparison of new elements against a known context.

  No doubt the changes will go on. Fresh from the front, I would add two observations about the specifics of legal education as I experienced them in my first year. That night in May, the faculty panel roundly agreed to the continuing vitality of the Socratic method. I would not differ directly, but the peculiar privilege which Socraticism grants a teacher to invade the security of every student in the room means that in the wrong hands it can become an instrument of terror. I never felt that my education gained by my being frightened, and I was often scared in class. Law faculties have too long excused, in the name of academic freedom, a failure to hold colleagues within basic limits of decency. They must formulate and enforce an etiquette of classroom behavior which insures that teachers cannot freely browbeat and exploit their students. To refuse leaves them in a subtle but persistent state of moral abdication. I know that it is hard to think of law students, headed for a life of privilege, as being among the downtrodden; and I also recognize that classroom terror has been a fixed aspect of legal education for at least a century. But the risk, the ultimate risk, of allowing students to make their first acquaintance with the law in such an atmosphere, in that state of hopeless fright, is that they will come away with a tacit but ineradicable impression that it is somehow characteristically "legal" to be heartless, to be brutal, and will carry that attitude with them into the execution of their professional tasks.

  Those objections to heavy-handed Socraticism are, in a fashion, only a part of a larger concern with legal education of which I began to become conscious after my conversations with Gina last fall. The law is at war with ambiguity, with uncertainty. In the courtroom, the adversary system, plaintiff against defendant, guarantees that someone will always win, someone lose. No matter if justice is evenly with each side, no matter if the issues are dark and obscure, the rule of law will be declared. The law and the arbitrary certainty of some of its results are no doubt indispensable to the secure operation of a society where there is ceaseless conflict requiring resolution.

  . But a lot of those attitudes toward certainty seem to rub off on the law world at large. Many of the institutions of legal education show a similar seeking after sureness and definition, a desire to subdue the random element, to leave nothing to chance: the admissions process, where statistical formulas serve as the basis for decision; the law-school classroom, where all power and discretion are concentrated in the professor; the stratifications so clearly marked in the law-school population, with the best students segregated on the law review, and the faculty remote from all; and the notion of the meritocracy, the attempt to rank and to accord privilege by some absolute standard. All of these things amount in my mind to a fighting of the war against ambiguity and uncertainness in quarters where it is not called for, where the need which supports the custom of the courtroom is not present. Not even the law can abolish the fundamental unclearness of many human situations, but in the law schools there is precious little effort made to address the degree to which human choice is arbitrary. We are taught that there is always a reason, always a rationale, always an argument. Too much of what goes on around the law school and in the legal classroom seeks to tutor students in strategies for avoiding, for ignoring, for somehow subverting the unquantifiable, the inexact, the emotionally charged, those things which still pass in my mind under the label "human." In time, I came to take that quality in legal education as another of those forces which could make me less a person than I'd like to be, that foe I'd come here to meet.

  Courses like Morris's and Zechman's which emphasized the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in the law are signs of what I consider progress. But students still see the operation of the law only in a secondhand and thirdhand way, as it is revealed in carefully prepared case reports. Learning to think like a lawyer should involve more than the mastery of an important but abstract mental skill. Were I king of the universe--or dean of Harvard Law School--I would supplement case reading with use of other devices--film, drama, informal narrative, actual client contact like that provided in the upper-year clinical courses--seeking to cultivate a sensitivity to the immediate human context in which the law so forcefully intervenes.

  Reforms like that, like others which look to be on the horizon, seem to bode well for us all. A more humane and humanistic education in the law strikes me as far more fitting than a schooling characterized by terror and the suppression of feeling for those persons who, in time, will become this society's chief custodians of justice.

  EPILOGUE:

  S

  8/21/76

  Grades came in at the middle of last month. Despite the calm and distance of the summer, the familiar apparatus of reaction set in place the instant I saw the envelope. My fingers shook and I felt the rush of all that teetering ambivalence. Please, I asked somebody, no Cs, even as I hoped for something exceptional.

  The grades were the same as first term, half As, half Bs. I got an A in the Policy course, a B-plus in Property; an A-minus from Nicky, a B from Perini. Good marks, I knew; they probably put me somewhere in the upper quarter of the class. I felt lucky. And still I was nagged by a desire for more.

  Within a few days, Gina, Stephen, Karen Sondergard--all scattered around the country for the summer--had called for the first time since the close of school. The conversations were convivial, but each turned in time to grades. The names and marks of those who'd made the Law Review from Section 2 had leaked out by now. Brodsky. Jenner. Sandy Stern. A couple of the quiet ones I never would have guessed. But not Stephen. (He had been right about his Con Law exam and sounded as though he was already regaining his sense of humor.) Not Kyle. Not Weiss. Not Hochschild. Not Shearing. Not me. Many were nearer than I was, but I still felt cheated. My sense of jealousy and denial left me dizzy for a day.

  My enemy, that greedy little monster, is still in there rattling his cage. I guess I will be contending with him always.

  Knowing that, I must admit that I made many of the rough spots in the past year far harder for myself. I met up with a lot of my own ugliness, and learned more than I wanted to about how deep it goes. I suppose that is part of the education, too. Which is not to say that the first year at Harvard Law School would do to everyone what it did to me. There are many people who would be wise enough to head back out the doors after a couple days.

  But those are not the people who usually come through those doors in the first place. It is those of us compulsively pursuing some vague idea of distinction who are most likely to aspire to the Harvard Law School, and for us the year is going to take its toll. In a funny way, I think law schools as institutions attract the people least suited to them at the start. We are men and women drawn to the study of rules, people with a native taste for order. The first year, when we do not know the language or how well we are doing, when professors seem only to be posing riddles every day, is bound to throw us for a loop. And at Harvard, that driven quest for prominence which brings us there, leads us, once we arrive, to an almost inescapable temptation to scramble, despite obstacles and ugliness and bruises, for what sometimes looks to all of us to be the very top of the tallest heap.

  So we come vulnerable, and the place does little to protect us from ourselves. There are people who managed the year with more grace than I did; others less. But all the conversations I have had with my law-school friends over the summer have returned, almost obsessively, to the year past and the question of exactly what it was that happened to us. Something exalted. Something fearful. We all reported at least one summer nightmare about Rudolph Perini. And we each admitted to wonder--and moments of real pride--when we thought about the persons we were last fall.

  In a few weeks, it will be fall again and the Harvard Law School will open its doors to another entering class. As we did, they will
bring with them their academic accolades, glittering like rows of military medals; they will bring a hunger for the law. They will bring their own great talents, energy, ambition, intelligence, charm. They will bring their enemies unmet.

  "It will be so strange to see them," Gina said when we spoke recently about the coming year. "They will be One Ls."

  AFTERWORD

  "No doubt, I would write a different book ten years from now emphasizing different events, expressing more or less concern about certain elements of my education."

  --One L, Preface

  .

  Each line is still inside me. I remember every word before it's read. However idiosyncratic my experience may have been, in writing One L I did not exaggerate either my excitement or my torment. When I turn the pages all the sensations whirl again within me: the panic and ferocious worry, the racing desire to understand, and a ubiquitous parched heat, as if the fervid pace of learning had sucked me dry. I shake my head. My lord.

  Was I nuts? I suppose the years since law school have forced me to admit I am not a garden-variety personality. Even by the skewed scale of law students, I am a good deal more compulsive than the average, and my fears of failure, especially at that time in my life, were profound. In the heat of law school, there was a kind of toxic fusion of these excesses; I wavered in the fumes. For those of more durable construction, day-to-day survival was likely to be less of an adventure.